Osho on Vincent Van Gogh Paintings

 

 

Bliss makes one victorious.

Money cannot make one victorious; at the most

It covers up your property

It does not make you rich, remember.

 

It simply helps you to forget your poverty,

That’s all — poverty remains, persists

But becomes repressed.

Wealth is a way to repress poverty

Power is a way

To repress your inferiority complex,

But you remain inferior

Power cannot make you superior.

 

You can become the president of a country

You can become a prime minister of a country

But you remain the same person,

Only the label changes, nothing else.

It changes nothing in you but

One can become hypnotised by the label.

People live by labels

People become very hypnotized by labels.

 

Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings were not sold

So he used to give to his friends —

What else to do with the paintings?

Not even a single painting was sold.

When he died even friends

Were not ready to hang his paintings

In their sitting rooms, in their drawing rooms

Because those paintings were very strange.

 

To hang them there

Was thought to become a laughing stock.

Anybody will see and he will think,

‘Have you gone mad or something? What is this?

What nonsense is this?’

So they will accept

Just not to hurt the feeling of Van Gogh

But they will throw the paintings in the basement

And then Van Gogh became famous when he died

And then people

Started searching for his paintings and suddenly

Paintings started coming into the drawing rooms

Of the kings and the emperors

And the prime minister and the presidents —

Even ordinary people were not ready!

 

One man was hanging a painting in his bathroom

Because nobody else will see except himself.

And he can tolerate it — he is a friend of Van Gogh

And the man is dead: Just in his memory

He can suffer it.

 

When Van Gogh’s name started becoming famous

The painting moved to the drawing room and

He was jubilant that he has a real painting.

But some critic wrote an article and proved that

It is phony, it is not true, it is not authentic

So he threw it into the basement —

The same painting.

 

But then there was great controversy

And other critics proved that it was authentic

Other scholars proved it was authentic.

When it was proved authentic

It came back again into the drawing room.

People live by labels! Nobody seems

To be interested in the painting itself.

The man is more concerned what others say.

 

And these are the power seekers:

They are always concerned what others are saying

And they completely forget who they are.

These are not the victorious people.

They may have money, they may have power

But they are poor people, very poor

They are beggars.

 

They real victorious people are very few.

They are the Buddhas, the awakened ones.

The are the people who have achieved bliss.

And the miracle is that

If you want to conquer the world

It is a very very arduous task because

There are so many competitors

And if you want to conquer yourself

There is no competition at all.

You can simply go in and conquer yourself —

No fight with anybody

No competition with anybody

No jealousy, no question of any politics…

But people never go inside.

 

-Osho, “No Man Is an Island, #7”